MAM
WPP and Adobe deepen AI partnership for marketing
Expanded tie-up integrates Firefly into WPP Open for agentic workflows across creative and media.
MUMBAI: WPP and Adobe just teamed up to give marketing a brain transplant because when AI agents start calling the creative shots, even the toughest briefs might finally get solved. WPP and Adobe announced on 24 February 2026 a deepened global partnership aimed at untangling the chaos of modern marketing through a tightly integrated suite of AI tools. The collaboration fuses Adobe’s generative AI models, content platforms, and data orchestration capabilities with WPP’s strategic, creative, and media expertise, creating what the companies call a unified end-to-end marketing solution.
At the core is WPP Open, the agency group’s agentic marketing platform which will now embed Adobe Firefly Foundry. This allows brands to train generative AI models on their own cleared intellectual property, ensuring brand-safe content from the outset. Adobe agents will handle content creation and adaptation, while WPP agents optimise media spend and activate campaigns across channels.
The move addresses a mounting industry pain point: brands must churn out more content, across more platforms, for narrower audiences, all while keeping consistency intact. Fragmented tools and siloed workflows often slow production and dilute impact. The partnership promises to automate complex, multistep tasks planning, creation, production, and activation into a single AI-enabled flow, freeing human teams for higher-level creativity.
WPP chief technology officer Stephan Pretorius said, “For years, we’ve watched brilliant creative ideas get stuck in production queues… With Adobe, we’re shattering the barriers between ideation and impact, building agentic content systems that handle the complexity so human creativity can soar.”
Adobe president of customer experience orchestration business Anil Chakravarthy added, “Marketing and creative teams today understand the high bar consumers have set for personalisation… Bringing together capabilities across Adobe and WPP provides a seamless way for brands to address this challenge, activating AI agents to drive customer experience orchestration and unlock personalisation at scale.”
Both companies emphasised the continued centrality of human talent. They plan to train and deploy creative AI forward-deployed engineers in the coming years to help clients maximise AI-driven workflows and prepare marketers to collaborate with agentic systems.
For an industry drowning in content demands and tool sprawl, this alliance could be the life raft turning fragmented chaos into coordinated firepower, one AI agent at a time. Whether it truly unshackles creativity or just adds another layer of tech remains the real test, but the pitch is clear: let machines sweat the complexity, so humans can shine at what they do best.
Brands
Apple bites back: the $599 MacBook Neo is the cheapest Mac ever made
The tech giant unveils a budget laptop that packs a punch — and a lot of cheek
CALIFORNIA: Apple has never been shy about charging a premium. So when Cupertino rolls out a MacBook at $599 (approx. Rs 55,000) , it’s worth sitting up straight.
The MacBook Neo, unveiled Tuesday, is Apple’s most affordable laptop to date — undercutting its own MacBook Air and taking a sharp swipe at the budget PC market in one fell swoop. It starts at $499 for students, which, for a machine with Apple silicon inside, is frankly a steal.
At the heart of the Neo is the A18 Pro chip — the same muscle that powers the latest iPhones. Apple claims it is up to 50 per cent faster for everyday tasks than a rival PC running Intel’s Core Ultra 5, and three times quicker on on-device AI workloads. Fanless and featherweight at 2.7 pounds, it runs silently and promises up to 16 hours of battery life. Try doing that on a Chromebook.
The 13-inch liquid retina display clocks in at 2408-by-1506 resolution with 500 nits of brightness and support for billion colours — sharper and brighter, Apple says, than most rivals in this price band. It comes dressed in four colours: blush, indigo, silver, and a zesty new citrus, with matching keyboard shades to boot.
Connectivity is modest — two USB-C ports, a headphone jack, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 6 — but this is a budget machine, not a pro workstation. The 1080p FaceTime camera, dual mics with directional beamforming, and Spatial Audio speakers round out a package that punches well above its weight class.
Apple senior vice-president of hardware engineering John Ternus alled it “a laptop only Apple could create.” That’s the kind of line that makes rivals wince — because, annoyingly, he might be right.
The Neo runs macOS Tahoe, with Apple Intelligence baked in for AI writing tools, live translation, and the sort of on-device smarts that keep user data away from the cloud. It also boasts 60 per cent recycled content — the highest of any Apple product — for those who like their bargains with a side of conscience.
For $599, Apple isn’t just selling a laptop. It’s selling an argument — that good design and real performance needn’t cost the earth. The PC industry had better have a decent comeback ready.
